The road to the nation's future, as the League of American Bicyclists sees it, will be bracketed by bike lanes and happily pedaling cyclists who feel safe and secure in their communal comfort zone.

It's enough to make Middleburg Heights resident Fred Oswald retch.

That's not because Oswald hates bikes or bikers. On the contrary: He is one. He rides some 5,000 miles a year, including almost daily commutes to and from his job as an engineer at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. He lobbies for bike-friendly state and local code reform. He writes bike-safety curricula for cyclists and police.

But he detests bike lanes and bike paths, and the aggressive agenda pushed by the league's leadership and its pro-bike and pro-environment allies. Their shared goal: to get billions of government dollars for thousands of more miles of bike-isolating pavement for millions more Americans on bikes.

Those organizations might as well funnel cyclists into stockyard chutes, Oswald says, because they're herding ill-equipped novices to a traffic slaughterhouse.

"There are a lot of people who believe bikes are the savior of the world, and those people are arrogant enough to think that other people are too dumb to ride if you don't create facilities for them," Oswald, 62, fumed recently.

"Fools rush in," he added. "People are going to get hurt and killed."

As the cycling mainstream gets stronger political legs, it encounters a backlash from dissident cyclists and advocates who are at least more shrill, if not more numerous, than ever.

Oswald is among the leaders and lightning rods of an insurrectionist "LAB Reform" wing within the league. These self-proclaimed "Vehicular Cycling" proponents insist bike riders need no special facilities. They contend cyclists have the same rights and responsibilities as motorists, and that both can coexist on the same (undemarcated) roads given enough training, awareness and skills.

But Sally Hanley, senior transportation planner for the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency, or NOACA, said bike usage and safety declined for decades before bike-centric traffic engineering led to a revival in both safety and participation.

Oswald unsuccessfully ran as a reform candidate for the bicyclists league board in 2003, but he hasn't given up on ousting what he calls its "unethical" leadership.

The league, formerly the League of American Wheelmen, formed to lobby for better roads 130 years ago, well before cars began to challenge cyclists for space. Now, the VC proponents say, the league they loved seems to have sold out.

Oswald says it and other cycling lobbies have become puppets for big bike manufacturers, importers and retailers.

Those interests "conspired to take over the league" with giant cash donations because "paint and path" -- paint-delineated bike lanes and off-road bike paths -- would help sell bikes to newbies, Oswald argues. The lobbying co-opted federal, state and local governments, and created a new class of cash-hungry "bike-friendly" consultants, all colluding to get more folks to ride, "safety be damned."

That's preposterous, other cycling advocates retort. Among them are many of Oswald's friends, who ally with him on other pro-bike agendas.

Government spendingappears to increase cyclingThe bike lobbies' ever-stronger legs have cranked out lots of paint and path, to be sure. Washington's transportation spending on dedicated bike lanes and paths has increased more than 110-fold over 20 years, to $540 million per year, according to the Rails to Trails Conservancy. Cities that have been most aggressive in adding bike facilities have seen corresponding spikes in bicycle use for recreation and, especially, for work commutes. And from 1995 to 2007, bike sales in the United States have risen by 20 percent.

Nowhere has the paint-and-path campaign succeeded more than in Portland, Ore., which sits atop the league's list of Bike-Friendly Communities. In 1990, the city had about 75 miles of bike lanes. Now there are almost 300. Biking to work has gotten so popular that bike-lane traffic jams have become a common nuisance on the bridges that carry almost 17,000 bike commuters into downtown each day.

Oswald maintains bike lanes and separate paths are just ways of consigning cyclists to "bike ghettoes" splattered with debris and broken glass. They're not for the benefit of riders, but to treat bikes as toys that should be kept out of motorists' way, he contends.

Some of his other complaints about separate bike facilities:

They reinforce the notion that cyclists are inferior and submissive, and encourage motorist harassment of riders who don't capitulate.

They perpetuate the myth that riding on the road is a peril to be avoided.

New cyclists who use them disregard the rules of the road or don't learn the skills they need. When the bike lane invariably ends and the riders are forced to mingle with the motorized masses, mayhem ensues.

They foster dangerous behavior, such as passing cars on the right. (That puts bikes on a collision course with right-turning motorists, who aren't unaccustomed to looking for a vehicle on their right.)

All of this is the product of an unethical bike-promoting campaign that "can be deadly as well as harmful to the cause," Oswald espouses on his LAB Reform Web site, labreform.org.

As more Oregonians ride,'it gets safer and safer'The problem with this criticism is that facts seem to get in the way, said Steve Magas, a Cincinnati lawyer who represents the interests of people injured or killed in cycling accidents.

"We've got more bikes and more riders, and we've got more cars on the road, yet we've got fewer [cyclist] deaths," observed Magas.

Nationally from 1995 to 2007, bike-wreck fatalities dropped by 16 percent and reported injuries dropped by 29 percent, while bike sales increased about 20 percent and the number of motorists and vehicles increased dramatically.

In Portland, the use of bikes has doubled three times in the last 15 years. In the last five, the percentage of Portlanders who say a bike is their primary ride to work has risen from 3 percent to 8 percent. The national average is less than 1 percent.

Yet in Portland, the number of reported bike crashes has hovered between 150 and 200 per year for 17 years. The annual count of fatal bike accidents in that period pingponged within a range of zero to six. Given the soaring use of bikes, those translate into a precipitous decline in rates of crashes and fatalities.

"As more and more people ride, it gets safer and safer," said Scott Bricker, who heads an Oregon lobby called the Bike Transportation Alliance. "As far as I'm concerned, the significant and continual rise in the number of people riding is an unqualified good thing."

The reasons for the increased safety seem twofold, Bricker and Magas say. First, separating bikes from cars eliminates chances for collisions. Second, as more people ride, motorists become more aware and respectful.

The league and other bike lobbies treat Oswald and the vehicular-cycling arguments dismissively. Their thrust isn't to sell bikes, they say, but to counter alarming trends -- air pollution, global warming, dependence on foreign oil and an epidemic of obesity and ill health.

Communications Director Megan Cahill said the bicyclists' league doesn't just represent expert, experienced bike commuters. Its goal is to "get people on bikes and have fun."

In Northeast Ohio,a call for more optionsPeople will go out of their way to use bike infrastructure instead of riding on the roads, even if the bike routes are longer, Portland State University urban-planning professor Jennifer Dill concluded last year.

In Greater Cleveland, bicyclists have few such options, which may explain the relatively low interest in cycling as a mode of transportation. Here, less than 0.5 percent of trips in 2007 were by bike, the Census Bureau reported. That ranked Cleveland 192nd among 442 cities surveyed.

NOACA's five-county transportation-planning jurisdiction encompasses 273 miles of bike infrastructure. That matches metro Portland's mileage -- but Greater Cleveland's is a disjointed spatter of spaghetti over 1,600 square miles -- 11 times the area of Greater Portland.

NOACA, Cleveland and many local governments have plans to improve. NOACA, for example, has decreed that all road widening, reconstruction or major-rehabilitation projects should include bike-dedicated lanes, or at least bike-friendly markings and share-the-road signs, unless planners prove that unworkable.

But there are few plans for new miles of bike lanes and paths. Some activists are trying to change that.

Kevin Cronin, an attorney and bike advocate, leads a nonprofit bike-club coalition called Cleveland Bikes. Oswald is a member, and both are active in the Ohio Bicycle Federation's reform lobbying.

"If you're going to increase the number of people substituting biking and walking trips for motorized-vehicle trips, you should be doing things to make those trips easy," Cronin said. "There are a lot of cyclists who need a little more help, and we want to help them."

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